Although his family was English, Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) was born and educated in Dublin. He left Ireland for England at thetime of the Revolution in 1688. He started to work for Sir William Temple, a scholar and Whig statesman who encouraged him to write his frst satirical works. Among his best satires were The Battle of the Books and A Tale ofa Tub, both published in 1704. In 1694 Swift returned to Ireland and became an ordained Anglican priest. From 1708 to 1714 he was mainly in London, where he made friends with other leading writers. He produced a great deal of writings for the Tory administration (I6.1), which found his talent for argument useful. In April 1713 he was made Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, where he remained for the next thirty years. In 1726 he published his masterpiece, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, known as Gulliver’s Travels. In 1729 A Modest Proposal appeared, in which, with irony and bitterness, Swift suggested that the poverty of the Irish people should be relieved by the saleof their children as food for the rich. Swift’s later years were marked by the decay of his mental faculties, due to labyrinthine vertigo, and by deafness. He died in 1745.